The present invention relates to user interactive computer supported display technology and particularly to graphical user interfaces which are user friendly and provide interactive users with an interface environment which is easy to use.
The 1990""s decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. This advance has been even further accelerated by the extensive consumer and business involvement in the Internet over the past two years. As a result of these changes, it seems as if virtually all aspects of human endeavor in the industrialized world require human-computer interfaces. There is a need to make computer directed activities accessible to a substantial portion of the world""s population which, up to a few years ago, was computer-illiterate or, at best, computer indifferent. In order for the vast computer supported market places to continue and be commercially productive, it will be necessary for a large segment of computer indifferent consumers to be involved in computer interfaces.
With the increasing power of computers, functions and resources available to the interactive user have greatly increased. However, along with this increase in function has come a significant increase in the number and variety of windows available to the user in a display screen interface. This, of course, makes the interface much more complex with tens, and potentially hundreds, of available windows which contain the interactive data elements, such as icons. These are arranged in stacks of overlapping windows, the display of which is controlled and tracked through a multi-tiered display or frame buffer, such as the depth buffers described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,241,656.
In fact, the multi-tiered hierarchy of windows has become so extensive that they often are arranged in a plurality of desktop session levels. A desktop session is usually made up of several layers of overlapping windows which the depth frame buffer indexes and tracks. In addition, window interfaces are set up to handle additional desktop sessions of layered windows which are inactive and stored outside of the frame buffer, but which may be interactively moved into and out of the frame buffer as the sessions are activated. With such a complex arrangement, it will be obvious that at any given time a substantial number of windows will be wholly or partially buried or hidden by overlapping windows.
When windowing environments were originally developed, the interactive user had to deal with no more than a handful of windows. From that time on, it became customary to identify each window with a title bar including the name or title of the window. With so few windows, even if there was some overlap, it was simple for the user to shift a window with his cursor so as to expose the title bar and identify the window. At the present time, with the number and the complicated hierarchies of windows described above, it is often a tedious and difficult task for the user to shift or drag the displayed windows to expose enough of the title bars to identify the respective windows. The present invention offers an implementation to simplify such window identification.
The present invention provides a user friendly display interface system for the interactive handling and sorting out of windows in complex window hierarchical graphical user interfaces. The system provides for the storage of a hierarchy of windows which are displayable to overlap each other in a selected order, whereby a plurality of said windows are partially visible. Means are provided for displaying, on a display screen, a plurality of these partially overlapping windows. A different audio identifier is provided and stored for each of these windows. Means are provided for moving around and positioning a pointing device, such as a cursor, on the display screen in combination with means responsive to the pointing device for announcing the audio identifier for each window which said pointing device enters. The pointing device may be a user controlled cursor, a stylus or even a finger in touch sensitive display systems. The audio identifier may conveniently be the name in the title bar of the window.